Recently, School of Communication Science and Disorders Assistant Professor Dr. Zilong Xie’s research paper, “Cortical tracking of continuous speech under bimodal divided attention”, was accepted for publication in Neurobiology of Language. Dr. Xie, an expert in hearing science, received his Bachelor’s of Science at Southwest University, his Master’s of Science at Peking University, and his Doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin before moving to teach at Florida State University in the fall of 2022. Dr. Xie is the Principal Investigator for FSU’s Hearing and Aging Research Laboratory (HEAR), and his work is primarily focused on understanding how speech processing is affected by aging and hearing loss.

Dr. Xie’s paper is specifically focused on understanding how the interaction between vision and hearing affects how our brains interpret speech sounds. He shared with CCI that his interest in this topic was piqued when he came across an interesting study on why we fail to detect auditory signals when attending visual events while earning his Ph. D..

On the research, Dr. Xie explained, “Our brains are constantly bombarded with information from different senses. We often need to juggle demands across different senses. Hearing and spoken communication are not an exception, e.g., listening to the news while driving. We know our speech understanding performance tends to drop in those scenarios. However, we do not know much about when, where, and how auditory and speech processing breaks down. This paper in Neurobiology of Language partly addressed this question and sheds light on the brain mechanisms for speech processing in real-life multisensory situations.”

Dr. Xie shared that he is ecstatic to have this paper published in Neurobiology of Language and that he’s excited for his work on both ongoing and new projects based on this research.